Chapter 23

The Physicalist Lens — How Assumptions Shape Interpretation

A. Fudge’s Argument: Everyone Reads with Assumptions—But Some Assumptions Hide Better Than Others

Have you ever put on a pair of tinted sunglasses and then, after wearing them for a while, completely forgotten you were wearing them? Everything looks normal to you. The sky seems to be the right shade of blue. The grass looks green. It is only when someone else points out the tint, or when you take the glasses off, that you realize you were seeing the whole world through a filter the entire time.

That is what a hermeneutical lens does to a reader of Scripture. A hermeneutical lens is simply the set of assumptions, beliefs, and background commitments you bring to the text before you read a single word. Everyone has one. I have one. You have one. Edward Fudge had one. There is no such thing as a “neutral” reading of the Bible—every reader approaches the text with expectations about what it will say, shaped by their theological training, their denominational tradition, their philosophical commitments, and even their personal experiences.¹

This is not, in itself, a criticism. The existence of presuppositions is a basic fact about how human beings read anything—not just the Bible, but novels, legal contracts, and grocery lists. The great Reformed epistemologist Alvin Plantinga made this point powerfully: we all begin from some starting point, and that starting point shapes everything that follows.² So the mere fact that Fudge brought assumptions to his reading of Scripture is not a gotcha. Of course he did. We all do.

The real question is this: Were Fudge’s assumptions about human nature correct? And if they were not, how did those incorrect assumptions shape his reading of the biblical evidence?

In the previous four chapters, we have done the hard work of examining Fudge’s treatment of the body-soul question from multiple angles. In Chapter 19, we documented how he consistently redefined key biblical terms—nephesh (often translated “soul”), ruach (“spirit”), psyche (the Greek word for “soul”), and pneuma (“spirit”)—in ways that stripped them of any reference to an immaterial self. In Chapter 20, we reviewed the approximately twenty-two body-soul passages he did discuss and showed that even these received treatments shaped by his physicalist framework. In Chapter 21, we examined the handful of passages he listed without providing any actual exegesis. And in Chapter 22, we catalogued the staggering forty-eight passages that bear directly on the body-soul question that he ignored entirely.

Now it is time to step back and ask the bigger question. Why did all of this happen? Why did an intelligent, careful scholar like Fudge consistently flatten the meaning of soul-language, dismiss intermediate-state texts, and skip over dozens of relevant passages? The answer, I believe, is not carelessness. The answer is a lens—a physicalist hermeneutical lens that filtered what he saw in the text before he ever began his exegesis.

Fudge did not set out to distort the Bible. I want to be very clear about that. I have no doubt that he believed he was reading Scripture faithfully. But his prior commitment to a physicalist (or “holistic monist”) anthropology functioned like those tinted sunglasses. It shaped what he noticed and what he overlooked. It determined which scholarly voices he trusted and which he ignored. It influenced how he handled passages that, on their face, seem to teach a distinction between body and soul. And it led him, again and again, to read the biblical evidence in a way that confirmed what he already believed about human nature.

In The Fire That Consumes, Fudge presents his anthropological framework in a section that runs from roughly pages 25 through 30.³ There he draws heavily on scholars like Hans Walter Wolff, A. T. Nikolainen, and Jan Bremmer—all of whom argue for a “holistic” view of the human person in which body, soul, and spirit are not separate components but different ways of describing the same unified creature.⁴ This is the foundation on which his entire treatment of human nature rests. He quotes Nikolainen approvingly as saying that the human person is “an indivisible whole” that can be described from different angles—body, flesh and blood, soul, spirit, and heart—but that none of these are “parts into which man may be divided.”⁵ He presents nephesh as “the most comprehensive term for man in his wholeness,” with meanings ranging from “neck” and “life” to “self” and “person”—but never, in Fudge’s telling, “immaterial soul.”⁶

On the surface, this all sounds very reasonable. And much of what Fudge says about the range of meanings of nephesh and ruach is simply true. These are flexible terms with many nuances, and no responsible scholar would deny that. But here is where the lens comes in: Fudge takes the undeniable flexibility of these terms and treats it as evidence that they never refer to an immaterial self. The wide semantic range becomes, in his hands, proof that the “soul” is only the whole person viewed from a particular angle. And once that conclusion is locked in place, the rest of his exegesis follows like water flowing downhill.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses: Four Ways the Physicalist Lens Distorts

How exactly does a physicalist hermeneutical lens shape the way someone reads Scripture? I want to identify four specific mechanisms—four ways that Fudge’s prior commitment to physicalism consistently distorted his exegesis. These are not hypothetical. We have documented every one of them in the preceding chapters. Here I want to gather them together and show the pattern.

Distortion 1: Flattening the Semantic Range of Nephesh and Ruach

The first and most fundamental distortion is the one we just described. Fudge takes the genuine semantic range of Hebrew and Greek anthropological terms and systematically excludes one end of that range—the end that refers to the immaterial self.

Consider how Fudge handles nephesh. He correctly notes that the word can mean “throat,” “breath,” “life,” “self,” “person,” and even “corpse.”⁷ These are all legitimate translations in various contexts. But he then moves from this observation to the conclusion that nephesh never refers to an immaterial substance. The full rainbow of meaning is acknowledged, but the one color that would support dualism is quietly removed.

John Cooper, whose work in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the most thorough treatment of biblical anthropology from a dualist perspective, noticed exactly this pattern in the broader scholarly discussion. Cooper observed that scholars like Wolff were entirely right to point out that nephesh and ruach have a wide range of meanings. But he also pointed out something these scholars tended to miss: even if the words themselves do not prove dualism, the narratives in which those words appear often presuppose it.⁸ When Rachel dies in Genesis 35:18 and the text says “her soul was departing,” the question is not whether nephesh can sometimes mean “life” in other contexts. The question is what it means here, in a narrative that describes something leaving the body at the moment of death.

Cooper was also careful to note that even Old Testament scholar Otto Kaiser had argued that nephesh is occasionally used to refer to the deceased person after separation from the body—a meaning that would make it functionally equivalent to “subsistent soul.”⁹ Fudge does not engage Kaiser’s argument. He does not mention it at all. His lens has already filtered it out.

Distortion 2: Dismissing Intermediate-State Passages as Metaphorical or Accommodative

The second mechanism of distortion is the way Fudge handles passages that describe conscious existence between death and resurrection. When a passage appears to teach that the dead are conscious and aware—as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), or the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11, or Paul’s desire to “depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:21–24)—Fudge employs one of two strategies. Either he treats the passage as metaphorical (the rich man and Lazarus is “just a parable” whose details cannot be pressed), or he treats the language as accommodation to popular belief (Jesus and Paul were simply using the language of their audience without endorsing it).¹⁰

Now, both of these are legitimate interpretive tools in the right context. Parables are not always meant to teach theology from every detail. And accommodation is a real phenomenon in Scripture—biblical writers sometimes use language and imagery that their audience would recognize, even if those images are not meant to be pressed for precise doctrinal content. The question is whether Fudge applies these tools consistently or selectively.

The answer is: selectively. When a passage supports his case for final destruction, Fudge reads it at face value. When a passage implies conscious existence after death, he reaches for the metaphor tool or the accommodation tool. This is not a conspiracy. It is just what happens when a lens is in place. You naturally read the texts that fit your framework as straightforward and the texts that challenge your framework as figurative or culturally conditioned.

Take the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Fudge devotes significant space to arguing that this parable was not intended to teach about the afterlife at all—it was a moral lesson about wealth and compassion.¹¹ He draws support from N. T. Wright, who argues the parable is about present social reversal, not a map of the afterlife.¹² And there is truth in this—the parable does have an ethical point. But the question Cooper and others have raised is this: Would Jesus use an image of the afterlife to make a moral point if that image were simply false?¹³ Would he portray the dead as conscious in Hades if he believed the dead were utterly non-existent? That seems, at the very least, a strange way to teach.

Or consider Revelation 6:9–11, where John sees the souls of the martyrs under the altar, crying out to God for justice. Fudge discusses this passage, but his interpretation must strip the scene of its most natural meaning. The text says souls are crying out. They are conscious. They are speaking. They are told to wait. On the face of it, this is exactly what a conscious intermediate state looks like. But the physicalist lens cannot allow that reading, so the souls become “symbolic” or “literary figures” rather than actual conscious beings.¹⁴

The pattern is unmistakable. Every time a passage presents the dead as conscious, Fudge finds a reason to read it as something other than what it appears to say. And every time, the reason just happens to align with his physicalist assumption that the dead cannot be conscious because there is no soul to sustain consciousness apart from the body.

Distortion 3: Ignoring Passages That Presuppose Body-Soul Duality

The third mechanism is the simplest and, in some ways, the most telling. As we documented in Chapter 22, Fudge completely ignores approximately forty-eight passages that bear directly on the body-soul question. These are not obscure or peripheral texts. They include Genesis 35:18 (Rachel’s soul departing at death), 1 Kings 17:21–22 (the child’s soul returning to his body), Matthew 26:38 (Jesus saying “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful”), 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 (absent from the body, present with the Lord), James 2:26 (the body without the spirit is dead), and dozens more.¹⁵

Why would a thorough scholar ignore forty-eight relevant passages? I do not believe the answer is laziness. Fudge was a diligent researcher. The far more likely explanation is the hermeneutical lens. When you are wearing physicalist sunglasses, passages that assume or teach body-soul duality simply do not register as important. They do not fit the categories you are working with. You are looking for evidence about the final fate of the wicked—destruction language, fire imagery, death terminology. Passages about the soul departing the body, or the inner man being renewed while the outer man is perishing, or the spirits of just men made perfect—these just do not show up on the radar. They are, quite literally, invisible through the physicalist lens.

Cooper makes a profound observation on this point. He notes that even if every single use of nephesh and ruach in the Old Testament could be translated without reference to an immaterial entity, this would tell us nothing about whether the Hebrews believed in the survival of persons after death. Why? Because the Israelites had other vocabulary for the disembodied dead—the rephaim (the “shades” of the departed)—and the existence of these figures in Sheol clearly presupposes some form of post-mortem personal survival.¹⁶ To argue that because nephesh and ruach do not always mean “immaterial soul,” the Hebrews did not believe in any kind of dualism, is what logicians call a non sequitur—the conclusion simply does not follow from the premise.¹⁷

Distortion 4: Relying on the “Hebrew Holism vs. Greek Dualism” Narrative

The fourth mechanism of distortion is perhaps the most important, because it provides the intellectual framework that makes the other three seem legitimate. This is the widely popularized narrative that contrasts “Hebrew holism” with “Greek dualism”—the idea that the ancient Hebrews had a unified, holistic view of the person while the Greeks introduced a foreign, Platonic dualism that split the person into body and soul.¹⁸

You have almost certainly encountered this narrative before. It goes something like this: “The Hebrews understood human beings as unified wholes. The Greeks split the person into body and soul. Unfortunately, early Christian theologians were influenced by Greek philosophy and imported Platonic dualism into their reading of Scripture. The result was the unbiblical idea that the soul is an immortal, immaterial entity that can exist apart from the body. If we want to recover the biblical view, we need to strip away this Greek contamination and return to the original Hebrew holism.”

This narrative is deeply embedded in Fudge’s work. It is the reason he cites Wolff and Nikolainen so extensively. It is the reason he quotes Bremmer’s claim that body-soul dualism in later Judaism and eventually in the Christian church was “directly” due to the influence of the Greeks.¹⁹ It is the silent engine driving his entire anthropological argument. And it is, as Cooper has demonstrated in devastating detail, a gross oversimplification that does not survive careful examination.

C. The Dualist Response: Dismantling the False Dichotomy

I want to spend the heart of this chapter doing something important. I want to show you, step by step, why the “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” narrative fails—and what a more faithful hermeneutical approach looks like. Because if this narrative falls, the entire intellectual foundation for the physicalist reading of the body-soul texts falls with it. And I believe it does fall. Decisively.

The Narrative’s Rise and Reign

The “Hebrew holism” narrative became a dominant force in twentieth-century biblical scholarship. Its roots go back to the work of scholars like H. Wheeler Robinson, who in the 1920s and 1930s popularized the idea of a “Semitic totality concept”—the view that the ancient Hebrews thought of human beings as indivisible psychophysical unities, with no conception of an immaterial soul.²⁰ This idea was picked up and amplified by Wolff, Eichrodt, Pannenberg, and others. By mid-century, it had become what Russell Aldwinckle called “a dogma of much so-called biblical theology”—the unquestioned assumption that Hebrew anthropology and Greek dualism were diametrically opposed, and that any hint of body-soul dualism in Christian theology was a foreign import.²¹

Cooper describes the intensity of this consensus with a striking phrase: the scholarly community had become “highly suspicious—almost paranoid—of the presence of Platonic dualism in the traditional interpretation of Scripture.”²² Scholars competed to outdo one another in emphasizing how holistic and anti-dualistic the Hebrew mind was. The result was an academic atmosphere in which anyone who defended the existence of the soul risked being dismissed as a crypto-Platonist—someone who had been duped by Greek philosophy into misreading the Bible.

This is the atmosphere Fudge was writing in. This is the well from which he drew. And it is important to understand that he was not inventing anything unusual. He was simply applying to the question of final punishment a set of anthropological assumptions that had become standard in large swaths of the scholarly world.

But standard does not mean correct.

Why the Narrative Fails: Cooper’s Critique

Cooper’s dismantling of the “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” narrative is one of the most important contributions to this entire debate. I cannot do it full justice here—I would urge every reader to engage with Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting directly—but I want to lay out the key moves of his argument, because they are devastating to the physicalist case.²³

First, Cooper shows that holism does not entail monism. This is a crucial distinction. Holism is the view that human beings function as integrated wholes—that body, soul, and spirit are not independent compartments but are deeply interconnected and interdependent. Monism is the view that human beings are only one kind of thing—entirely physical, with no immaterial component at all. Cooper argues, rightly, that you can affirm holism without affirming monism. You can believe that human beings are deeply integrated psychophysical unities and also believe that they are composed of both material and immaterial dimensions. In fact, this is exactly what substance dualism teaches.²⁴

Think about it this way. A married couple is a functional unity. The husband and wife are deeply integrated—they share a life, a home, decisions, and experiences. You might describe their relationship as “holistic.” But that does not mean there is only one person in the marriage. There are two distinct individuals who function together as a unified whole. In the same way, body and soul can function together as a deeply integrated unity without being the same thing.

Cooper puts this in more precise philosophical terms. He distinguishes between functional holism—the view that all parts of the human person work together as an integrated system—and ontological holism—the view that no part of the person can survive the dissolution of the whole.²⁵ Functional holism is fully compatible with substance dualism. Ontological holism is not. The Hebrew evidence supports functional holism. The question is whether it also supports ontological holism—and Cooper argues powerfully that it does not.

Second, Cooper shows that the Old Testament itself presupposes a duality of ingredients. Go back to Genesis 2:7. God forms the man from the dust of the ground—that is one ingredient, the material component. Then God breathes into him the breath of life—that is a second ingredient, the animating principle that comes not from the earth but from God. Whatever philosophical labels we attach to these two “ingredients,” they are clearly different kinds of things. The dust does not generate life on its own. The ruach or neshama (breath of life) is not contained within the dust. God brings something from outside the material order and puts it into the formed body. As Cooper observes, this picture simply does not look like it could be elaborated into any kind of monism—materialist, idealist, or otherwise.²⁶

Third, Cooper shows that the Old Testament evidence for survival after death is far stronger than the physicalist narrative allows. The Hebrew concept of Sheol is not just a metaphor for the grave. It is a realm where the dead exist in a diminished but real state. The rephaim are there. Samuel appears from Sheol at the medium of Endor’s summoning (1 Sam. 28). The prophets speak of the dead in Sheol as conscious, even if their existence is grim compared to earthly life. All of this presupposes that something of the person survives biological death.²⁷

Cooper makes the inescapable logical point: whether the surviving entity is called nephesh, ruach, rephaim, or something else entirely, the fact that it exists apart from the earthly body entails some form of dualism. The conclusion is unavoidable. If the person is separable from the flesh-and-bones body and continues to exist after that body decomposes, then we have two things where there used to be one integrated whole. That is dualism by definition, regardless of what labels we use.²⁸

Fourth, Cooper exposes the false identification of dualism with Greek thought alone. The narrative assumes that body-soul dualism was invented by the Greeks and then imported into Jewish and Christian thought. But Cooper shows that this is historically naïve. Belief in the survival of something after the death of the body is found in cultures all over the world—ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, African, Asian, and Indigenous traditions all include some form of it.²⁹ The idea that the Hebrews were the only ancient culture to believe that death was the absolute end of the person, and that any belief in survival was necessarily a Greek contamination, is not a historical conclusion. It is a theological assertion masquerading as a historical one.

Furthermore, as Cooper observes, there were monists and materialists among the Greeks too. Stoics were largely materialist. Epicureans denied the survival of the soul. The idea that “Greek” automatically means “dualist” is just as simplistic as the idea that “Hebrew” automatically means “monist.”³⁰ The reality is far more complex on both sides, and any responsible historical account must reckon with that complexity.

How a Dualist Reads the Same Texts—Without Importing Greek Philosophy

So if the physicalist lens distorts, what does a dualist lens look like? And how is it different from “imposing Greek philosophy on the Bible”?

This is an important question, because the standard physicalist response to any dualist reading is to wave the “Greek contamination” flag. “You’re reading Plato into the text!” “That’s not what the Hebrew mind thought!” These responses sound decisive, but they are actually a form of question-begging. They assume the very thing that needs to be proved—that any notion of body-soul duality must come from Greek philosophy rather than from the biblical text itself.

A substance dualist does not begin with Plato or Descartes. A substance dualist begins with the biblical text and lets it speak on its own terms. Here is what that looks like in practice.

When a substance dualist reads Genesis 2:7, she notices that God forms the body from dust and then adds something different—the breath of life—from outside the material order. She does not need Plato to see that two ingredients are at work here. The text says it plainly.

When a substance dualist reads Genesis 35:18, he notices that Rachel’s nephesh is described as departing at the moment of death. He does not need Descartes to suggest that something left the body. The text says it.

When a substance dualist reads 1 Kings 17:21–22, she notices that Elijah prays for the child’s nephesh to return to his body—and the text says it did, and the child lived. She does not need Greek philosophy to conclude that the nephesh and the body are distinguishable entities that can be separated and reunited. The narrative assumes it.

When a substance dualist reads Matthew 10:28, he notices that Jesus distinguishes between those who can kill the body but cannot kill the psyche, and the One who can destroy both psyche and body in Gehenna. He does not need any philosophical tradition to see that Jesus is working with a body-soul distinction. The words are right there in the text.³¹

When a substance dualist reads 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, she notices Paul’s contrast between being “at home in the body” and “absent from the Lord” on the one hand, and being “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord” on the other. She does not need neo-Platonism to hear the implication that Paul expected to be conscious with Christ after leaving the body but before receiving the resurrection body.³²

When a substance dualist reads James 2:26—“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also”—he notices that James takes it as simply obvious that the body without the spirit is dead. The body-spirit distinction is not the point of the verse; it is the background assumption everyone shares. James does not argue for it. He assumes it. And assumptions like that are often the most revealing evidence of what a community actually believed.³³

None of this requires any Greek philosophical influence. It only requires paying attention to what the biblical writers actually said—and taking them at their word.

The Intertestamental Evidence Confirms the Pattern

Cooper’s analysis of the intertestamental period is especially important for our argument. The writings of Second Temple Judaism—from roughly 200 BC to 100 AD—provide a bridge between the Old and New Testaments. And what we find there is not a sudden Greek import of dualism into previously monistic Jewish thought. What we find is a development of ideas already present in the Old Testament, in which nephesh and ruach (and their Greek equivalents, psyche and pneuma) begin to be used explicitly and unambiguously to refer to the disembodied dead.³⁴

In 1 Enoch 22, the dead exist in separate chambers, divided by their moral character, awaiting the final judgment. They have voices. They cry out. They are conscious. In 2 Esdras (4 Ezra) 7, the dead are depicted as aware of God and of his expectations. In Wisdom of Solomon, the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. In 4 Maccabees, the martyrs face death knowing that a conscious existence beyond death awaits them.³⁵

Now, was this development influenced by Greek thought? Possibly in some cases. Cooper freely acknowledges that the intertestamental period was one of significant cultural exchange between Jewish and Hellenistic worlds.³⁶ But two critical observations must be made.

First, the Jewish version of post-mortem existence was strikingly different from the Greek version. Greek dualism exalted disembodiment as the soul’s liberation. Jewish eschatology retained the expectation of bodily resurrection. The dead in Jewish intertestamental literature are depicted as retaining bodily form even in the intermediate state—they are not pure spirits freed from the prison of the flesh. This is not Plato. This is a distinctly Jewish vision that preserves the Old Testament emphasis on the goodness of the body.³⁷

Second, the development of explicit soul-language for the disembodied dead may simply represent the explication of something already implicit in the Old Testament itself. The rephaim of the Old Testament—the shades who exist in Sheol—are already post-mortem persons who exist apart from their earthly bodies. The intertestamental writers did not need the Greeks to tell them that the dead survive. They had the Psalms, the prophets, and the narrative traditions. What they did was develop a more precise vocabulary for what their ancestors had already believed.³⁸

A Second Test: Paul’s “Inner Man” and “Outer Man”

Before we look at Matthew 10:28, let me briefly consider another case where the lens is easy to spot. In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul writes: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.” Fudge does not discuss this verse in The Fire That Consumes. It is one of the forty-eight ignored passages we catalogued in Chapter 22.

But think about what Paul is saying here. He draws a contrast between two aspects of the person—one that is perishing (the outward man, the body that is aging, getting sick, winding down toward death) and one that is being renewed (the inward man, the spiritual self that is growing stronger even as the body weakens). This is not a contrast that makes any sense on a strictly physicalist reading. If the human being is entirely physical, then what is Paul talking about when he says the “inward man” is being renewed? The brain? The nervous system? Those are part of the outward man too—they age and decline right along with the rest of the body.

The most natural reading of this text is that Paul is distinguishing between the material body and the immaterial self. The body is wasting away, but the real person—the soul, the spirit, the inner self that knows God—is growing stronger. This is substance dualism, expressed in the apostle’s own language, without any help from Greek philosophy. Paul does not cite Plato. He does not reference the Academy. He simply describes what he has experienced as a follower of Christ: his body is breaking down, but his inner life with God is flourishing.

And Paul does not stop there. Just a few verses later, in 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, he unpacks this contrast in explicitly eschatological terms. He speaks of the earthly “tent” (the body) being destroyed and a heavenly “building” (the resurrection body) waiting. He describes a state of being “unclothed”—existing between the dissolution of the earthly body and the receiving of the resurrection body. And he says that he would prefer to be “absent from the body and present with the Lord.”⁵⁹ The language here is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with physicalism. Paul seems to envision a conscious state of personal existence without the body—an intermediate state in which the believer is with Christ. This is precisely what substance dualism predicts and precisely what physicalism cannot easily accommodate.

The physicalist interpreter has to work very hard with this passage. Some appeal to an “immediate resurrection” view—the idea that believers receive their resurrection bodies instantly at death, so there is no disembodied intermediate state at all. Others invoke the “alternate temporality” idea—that time works differently for the dead, so the gap between death and resurrection is experienced as instantaneous even though earthly time continues. These are creative proposals, but they are driven by the need to avoid what the text most naturally says.⁶⁰ And that is exactly the point of this chapter. When the lens requires you to constantly look for alternative explanations of texts that seem perfectly clear on their face, the lens itself should come under scrutiny.

Paul’s language in Philippians 1:21–24 points in the same direction. He is torn between two desires: to remain in the body and continue his ministry, or to “depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” The word “depart” (analusai) suggests a release—the soul leaving the body, the person exiting the tent. And Paul says being with Christ is “far better” than remaining in the body. This only makes sense if Paul expects to be consciously with Christ after departing the body. If death is simply non-existence until the resurrection, it is hard to see how Paul could call it “far better.”⁶¹

Now, I am not providing the full exegesis of these passages here. That work has been done in Chapters 13 and 16 of this book. My purpose is narrower: to show how the physicalist lens forces an interpreter to manage these texts rather than simply listen to them. The dualist reads Paul and hears exactly what Paul seems to be saying: the inner self survives the body’s death and is with Christ. The physicalist reads the same texts and must immediately begin qualifying, reframing, and proposing alternatives. That difference should give us pause.

The Test Case: Matthew 10:28

I want to look at one more specific passage to show how dramatically the lens affects interpretation. Matthew 10:28 is perhaps the single most important text in the entire body-soul debate within conditional immortality. Jesus says: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

This verse is the crown jewel of the conditionalist case for final destruction. God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. That is a powerful proof text for CI. Fudge uses it prominently, and rightly so.³⁹

But notice what Jesus says in the first half of the verse. Humans can kill the body but cannot kill the psyche. Only God can destroy both soul and body. Think about what that means. If psyche here just means “life” or “the whole person,” as Fudge argues, then the first half of the verse makes no sense. Humans can kill the whole person. That is exactly what murder does. But Jesus says there is something humans cannot touch even when they kill the body. He calls it the psyche. And then he says God can destroy that too—both psyche and body.⁴⁰

The logic of this verse requires a real distinction between body and soul. It requires that the soul survive the death of the body. And it requires that God, who is able to do what humans cannot, can destroy both the surviving soul and the body in the final judgment. This is exactly what substance dualism teaches. And it is exactly what conditional immortality should affirm: the soul is not inherently immortal. God can destroy it. But it is real, and it survives the body’s death.

When Fudge reads this verse through the physicalist lens, he must somehow flatten psyche into something that does not actually survive the body’s death. He does this by appealing to the wide semantic range of the term. But the semantic range is not the issue. The issue is what the word means in this context, and the context demands a body-soul distinction.⁴¹

This is what happens when assumptions drive exegesis instead of the other way around. The text says one thing. The lens says another. And the lens wins.

The Lens Behind the Lens: Modern Naturalism’s Hidden Influence

There is one more layer to this story that needs to be told. The “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” narrative did not emerge in a vacuum. It arose in a twentieth-century intellectual context deeply shaped by philosophical naturalism—the view that the physical world is all there is. The rise of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the general “disenchantment” of the modern Western world created an intellectual atmosphere in which belief in anything immaterial was considered pre-scientific and embarrassing. Christian scholars who wanted to be taken seriously in the academy felt pressure to distance themselves from the idea of the soul.⁴²

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is simply a description of how intellectual fashions work. When the dominant culture says the soul is a relic of pre-scientific thinking, and when the dominant model in biblical studies says the Hebrews had no concept of an immaterial soul, it becomes very easy for well-meaning Christian scholars to assume that dualism is philosophically outdated and exegetically unsupported. The pressure comes not from any single source but from the general drift of the culture.

Rickabaugh and Moreland, in The Substance of Consciousness, describe what philosopher Daniel Stoljar calls “the Standard Picture”—the widespread assumption in contemporary philosophy that strong physicalism is true, that it summarizes the picture of the world implied by the natural sciences, and that the job of philosophy is to show how our everyday experience of consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility can be squeezed into a physicalist framework.⁴³ This assumption is so pervasive in the academy that scholars who reject it are often treated not as making a conceptual mistake but as flying in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The irony is thick. Christian physicalists in the CI movement have adopted an anthropological framework whose deepest roots are not in Scripture but in the same modern naturalism that denies the supernatural altogether. They have borrowed the naturalist’s conclusion—that humans are entirely physical beings—and tried to make it fit a biblical theology that presupposes the reality of God, the resurrection, and the spiritual realm at every turn. The tension is not sustainable.⁴⁴

Cooper makes a similar point with his characteristic directness. He notes that the move from “Hebrew holism” to outright physicalism is not a natural or necessary step. You can affirm that the Old Testament presents human beings as integrated wholes without concluding that they are only physical. Holism and dualism are not opposites. The opposite of holism is fragmentation, not dualism. And the opposite of dualism is monism, not holism.⁴⁵ The conflation of these categories is one of the most persistent and damaging errors in the whole debate.

Reading Without the Tinted Glasses: What Scripture Actually Teaches

So what happens when you take off the physicalist sunglasses and read the biblical evidence without filtering out the dualist data? The picture that emerges is not Platonic dualism. It is not Greek. It is deeply, thoroughly, unmistakably biblical. And it looks something like this.

God creates human beings from two kinds of “ingredient”—the material dust of the ground and the immaterial breath of life that comes from God himself (Gen. 2:7). Human beings are integrated, holistic creatures whose physical and spiritual dimensions work together in a beautiful unity. But at death, these two dimensions are separated. The body returns to the dust (Eccles. 12:7). The spirit returns to God. Something of the person survives. In the Old Testament, this surviving person exists in Sheol as one of the rephaim. In the New Testament, the believer’s soul is with Christ in paradise (Luke 23:43; Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8), and the unbeliever’s soul is in Hades (Luke 16:23).⁴⁶

This intermediate state is not the final state. It is a waiting period between death and resurrection. At the resurrection, body and soul are reunited. The whole person stands before God. Those who are in Christ receive immortality and the fullness of resurrection life. Those who finally refuse God’s grace are destroyed—body and soul—in the second death (Matt. 10:28; Rev. 20:14).⁴⁷

This is what conditional immortality looks like when built on a dualist foundation. It is coherent. It is biblically grounded. It takes the intermediate-state texts at face value. It takes the destruction texts at face value too. It does not need to flatten the meaning of nephesh and psyche. It does not need to dismiss Luke 16, Revelation 6, Philippians 1, or 2 Corinthians 5 as metaphorical or accommodative. It does not need to ignore forty-eight passages. It takes them all seriously and lets them contribute to a unified picture.

The physicalist lens cannot do this. It must constantly manage the evidence—filtering some texts, redefining others, ignoring the rest. That is what happens when you start with the wrong assumptions. You end up fighting the text instead of listening to it.

D. Counter-Objections and Replies

Objection 1: “You’re just replacing one set of assumptions with another.”

This is probably the most obvious objection, and it deserves a thoughtful answer. Yes, I am bringing assumptions to the text too. Every reader does. The question is not whether I have assumptions but whether my assumptions lead me to read the text more faithfully than the physicalist’s assumptions do.

Here is the test I would propose. Which hermeneutical lens allows more of the biblical data to be read at face value? Which lens requires less filtering, less redefining, and less ignoring of relevant passages? The substance dualist lens allows Genesis 35:18 to mean what it says. It allows Matthew 10:28 to mean what it says. It allows 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 to mean what it says. It allows Revelation 6:9–11 to mean what it says. The physicalist lens must constantly explain why these texts do not mean what they appear to mean. That difference is significant.⁴⁸

I am not claiming perfect objectivity. I am claiming that the dualist lens fits the evidence better—that it allows more of Scripture to speak in its own voice without being muffled by prior commitments.

Objection 2: “Dualism is a philosophical position, not a biblical one.”

This objection rests on the assumption that philosophical categories cannot also be biblical. But that is a strange claim. When Jesus distinguishes body and soul in Matthew 10:28, he is making a claim about the nature of human beings. You can call it a philosophical claim if you like. But it is also a theological claim, grounded in divine revelation. The question is not whether the categories are “philosophical” but whether they are true.⁴⁹

Furthermore, every position in this debate involves philosophy—including physicalism. Nancey Murphy’s nonreductive physicalism is a deeply philosophical position. Joel Green’s neuro-hermeneutic is shaped by neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Kevin Corcoran’s constitution view is a metaphysical thesis. The claim that “only physicalism is biblical while dualism is philosophical” is simply not accurate. Both positions involve philosophical commitments. The question is which set of philosophical commitments better accounts for the biblical data.⁵⁰

Objection 3: “Cooper and other dualists are just as selective in their reading as Fudge is.”

This is a fair challenge, and it pushes me to be specific. Are dualist scholars selective? Sure. Everyone is, to some degree. But here is the difference: Cooper does not ignore passages that challenge his view. He engages the strongest physicalist arguments head-on. He acknowledges that nephesh and ruach have a wide semantic range. He admits that Old Testament anthropology is holistic. He grants that the dead in Sheol are described in grim, diminished terms. He does not pretend the evidence is all on one side.⁵¹

What Cooper does, and what Fudge does not, is allow the full range of evidence to speak. He does not skip over the texts that challenge his view. He engages them. And after engaging them, he argues that the dualist reading is the most faithful to the whole of Scripture. That is the difference between wearing tinted glasses and taking them off.

Objection 4: “But Fudge’s case for CI doesn’t depend on his anthropology. You can separate the two.”

This is actually very close to what I have been arguing throughout this book. You can separate CI from physicalism. That is the whole point. Fudge’s case for CI is strong on its own merits. The exegetical evidence that the wicked will be destroyed rather than tortured forever is powerful, and it does not require physicalism. But Fudge himself did not separate them. He presented his physicalist anthropology as though it were a natural and necessary companion to his case for final destruction. And in doing so, he led many CI advocates to absorb physicalist assumptions they did not need and that the biblical evidence does not support.⁵²

The good news is that once you see the lens for what it is, you can take it off without losing the baby with the bathwater. CI stands firm. The wicked will be destroyed. But they are body and soul—and both will be destroyed in the second death. That is what Jesus said. That is what substance dualism teaches. And that is what conditional immortality should affirm.

I have met CI advocates who resist this conclusion because they have been told—by Fudge, by the Rethinking Hell community, by the general atmosphere of the movement—that the soul is a Greek idea, that physicalism is the biblical view, and that any talk of the soul surviving death is a throwback to Platonic philosophy. I understand that resistance. I once felt it myself. But when I sat down and actually read Cooper, actually worked through the passages Fudge ignored, actually compared the physicalist reading to the dualist reading on text after text, the evidence was overwhelming. The physicalist lens does not fit the data. The dualist lens does. And CI is actually stronger for it—because on dualism, Matthew 10:28 makes perfect sense: God destroys both soul and body in Gehenna. The soul is not inherently immortal. It is sustained by God. And God can end it.

Objection 5: “Isn’t this just about emphasis? Can’t we agree that the Bible emphasizes the whole person without getting bogged down in metaphysics?”

I hear this objection a lot, and I understand its appeal. Many pastors and lay readers are not interested in technical philosophical debates about substance metaphysics. They just want to know what the Bible teaches and how to apply it. And I respect that instinct. The Bible is not a philosophy textbook.

But here is why the metaphysical question matters. If there is no soul—if human beings are entirely physical—then what happens when the body dies? On physicalism, the person ceases to exist. Full stop. There is no conscious intermediate state. There is no experience of being “with Christ.” There is no Hades. There is nothing until God recreates the person at the resurrection. And this has direct pastoral consequences. What do you say to a grieving widow? If physicalism is true, her husband is nowhere. He is not with Jesus. He does not exist. He is simply gone until the resurrection.⁶²

The substance dualist can say something very different. She can say, with Paul: “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” She can say, with Jesus: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.” She can say that the departed believer is conscious, is with Christ, and is at peace—even as we grieve the separation. That is not just metaphysics. That is pastoral care grounded in the biblical promise of conscious fellowship with God after death.

The question of what a human being is is not an abstract distraction. It shapes what we believe about death, about hope, about the nature of God’s promises, and about the comfort we can offer to the suffering. It shapes our entire eschatology. Getting it right is not optional. It is essential.

A Brief Word About Joel Green

I want to say a brief word about Joel Green’s work, because his Body, Soul, and Human Life is one of the most sophisticated presentations of the physicalist reading of Scripture, and his arguments deserve engagement rather than dismissal.⁵³

Green is a careful scholar who takes the biblical text seriously. His argument is not simply “neuroscience disproves the soul.” He argues that when we read the New Testament in its own cultural and literary context, what we find is a deeply embodied anthropology in which personal identity is constituted by social relationships and embodied practices, not by an immaterial substance.⁵⁴

I appreciate Green’s scholarship, and I think he raises important questions about the social and relational dimensions of personhood that substance dualists need to take seriously. But his work suffers from the same fundamental problem we have been describing in this chapter: he begins with the “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” framework and then reads the evidence through it. The lens does the work before the exegesis begins. And that means he, like Fudge, must manage the intermediate-state texts, explain away the body-soul distinctions, and marginalize the narratives of soul-departure and return. The result is a reading of Scripture that is impressively learned but ultimately incomplete—because it cannot do justice to the full range of biblical evidence.⁵⁵

Green also admits, interestingly, that the parable of the rich man and Lazarus does portray something that looks like an intermediate state from the perspective of those still alive on earth. He simply argues that whether the dead experience this as a waiting period is a different question.⁵⁶ This is a creative solution, but it requires quite a lot of theological work to sustain, and it sits uncomfortably with the straightforward meaning of texts like Luke 23:43 (“Today you will be with Me in Paradise”), where Jesus clearly implies that the thief will be consciously with him that very day.

The Cumulative Weight of the Evidence

Let me draw the threads of this chapter together. The physicalist hermeneutical lens, as we have seen, operates through four mechanisms of distortion. It flattens the semantic range of nephesh and ruach. It dismisses intermediate-state texts as metaphorical or accommodative. It ignores passages that presuppose body-soul duality. And it rests on a “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” narrative that does not survive careful scrutiny.

When you take this lens off and read the biblical evidence on its own terms, the picture is clear. Human beings are created from two kinds of ingredient—material and immaterial. They function as integrated wholes during earthly life. But at death, the two dimensions are separated. The person survives in a conscious intermediate state. And at the resurrection, body and soul are reunited for the final judgment.⁵⁷

This is not Greek philosophy. This is the Bible’s own testimony, expressed in its own categories, and confirmed across both Testaments and the intertestamental literature. It is what the church has believed for the vast majority of its history. And it is what conditional immortality should affirm.

Fudge gave us an extraordinary gift in The Fire That Consumes. His work on final punishment is monumental, and I continue to learn from it. But his anthropology was shaped by a lens he may not have known he was wearing. The physicalist framework he adopted from Wolff, Nikolainen, and Bremmer was not the result of his own independent exegesis. It was a received framework, adopted from a scholarly consensus that was itself shaped by modern anti-dualist trends. And once adopted, it silently filtered everything he saw in the text.⁵⁸

I want to be careful here, because I do not want this chapter to sound like I am impugning Fudge’s motives or his integrity. I am not. Fudge was a man of deep faith and genuine scholarship. He loved the Bible and wanted to get it right. But loving the Bible and wanting to get it right does not make you immune to hermeneutical lenses. None of us are immune. The question is not whether we have lenses—we all do—but whether we are willing to examine them. Whether we are willing to ask, “Am I filtering out evidence that does not fit my framework?” Whether we are willing to read the strongest case for the other side and see if it has merit.

That is what Cooper did. In Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, he did not begin by assuming dualism and then looking for proof texts. He began by laying out the monist and holistic case in its strongest form. He gave Wolff and Eichrodt and Pannenberg their full say. He acknowledged everything they got right. And only then did he show where their argument broke down—where the narrative evidence of the Old Testament, the intertestamental literature, and the New Testament pointed away from ontological holism and toward a genuine dualism. That is the kind of scholarship we need more of in the conditional immortality movement. Honest. Rigorous. Willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it challenges assumptions we have held for years. The CI movement has always prided itself on following Scripture rather than tradition. Here is a chance to prove it—not by abandoning the tradition but by returning to the most ancient and widespread tradition of all, the one that Scripture itself teaches: that we are body and soul, created by God, sustained by God, and destined for resurrection by God.

The invitation of this chapter—and of this entire book—is simply this: take off the glasses. Read the evidence fresh. Let the text speak. And see if what it says is not exactly what the church has always believed—that we are more than dust. We are body and soul. And both matter to God.